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Growth per Year
Growth per Year
The growth-per-year rating for timberland captures critical information in a single number: How much wood will the land grow each year? Answering this question is important: it tells how productive timberland is, so it compresses critical information about soil and climate in a single number, just like the MPG rating on a car or annual KWH usage sticker on a new refrigerator.
Scientists express growth/year as cubic meters per hectare (m3/ha), but most foresters in the United States use a different measure: board feet/acre.
Another way to express the same basic concept is to determine the timberland's site index. Like a growth/year rating, a site index is a single number that helps determine how productive the land is. This concept is explained well by "Site Index – A Measurement for Timberland Quality and Potential", American Forest Management:
Not all land is created equal, some soils and sites are more productive than others. Foresters use a metric called site index as a quick determinate of a property’s tree growth potential. This can be very valuable in helping owners understand the growth potential of different forest stands and species on their property, evaluate purchase decisions when searching for a timberland investment, project future stand growth and income, as well as understand how active forest management may improve the site index in a given area.
We looked carefully through the OSU Elliott State Forest Research Plan, and we couldn't find anywhere that talked about the Elliott State Forest's growth/year or site index. This curious omission says a lot about thinking of the people who prepared the plan.
Because we feel this information is essential to understanding timberland, we asked Jerry Phillips, who spent almost his entire career as a forester and forest manager on the Elliott from 1956 until his retirement in 1989.
Jerry Phillips used the rule of thumb measure of 1,000 board feet/acre for growth/year on the Elliott State Forest, and he put the overall growth for the entire forest at 70 or 80 million board feet per year. But to be conservative, we will use 60 million board feet per year when we make growth or value estimates in this website.
Most people have no clue about the size or value of 60 million board feet. So to help put this in perspective, a standard log truck is likely to carry 3,500 to 4,000 board feet. If we once again take the conservative figure, the annual growth on the Elliott State Forest is 60,000,000/4,000 or 15,000 truck loads. Even 15,000 truck loads is a hard figure to understand, so assume logs are removed on 200 days during the year. Then each day, 75 log truck loads of logs would need to be removed to keep up the timber growth on the Elliott.
Timber volumes on the Elliott State Forest: past, present and two future scenarios.
Timber Volume
Timber Volume
This section looks at timber volumes on the Elliott State Forest: past, present, and two future scenarios.
A long-term overview really helps put things in perspective, so the nearby graph is important because it shows how dramatically the Elliott State Forest has changed over time. Each bar in the graph deserves explanation:
1930: Ninety percent of the Elliott was repeatedly burned by catastrophic fires in the 1800s, so when the Elliott was acquired by Oregon in 1930, a reasonable guess is the Elliott had only 500 million board feet of timber, mostly in scattered unburnt areas of old-growth timber. This guess was provided by Jerry Phillips, who spent almost his entire career as a forester and forest manager on the Elliott.
Harvested (1955-2000): The Elliott was actively managed from 1940 through the 1980s. This involved harvesting virtually all the remnant old-growth trees along with clearcutting younger stands. Harvesting has tapered off dramatically since 1990 and has stopped altogether since 2017. The total harvested volume from 1955 through 2000 was about 700 million board feet, and the revenue from these harvests went directly to K-12 school districts throughout Oregon.
2020: By adjusting the 2016 timber cruise for growth, we know the Elliott State Forest now has 3,400 million board feet of timber, primarily Douglas Fir. This is six times more timber than the forest had when the State of Oregon acquired the forest in 1930. This bears repeating: the Elliott State Forest has far more timber today than it has had at any time in the last 150 years.
This raises an interesting environmental question: How much more timber does the Elliott State Forest need to have in order to meet the needs of endangered species?2100 w/o fire: This bar shows how much timber the Elliott State Forest will have in 2100 if the OSU Plan is adopted and no major fires occur. This is a simple theoretical calculation: the timber volume in 2020 is 3,400 million board feet, and the forest grows 60 million board feet a year, and the OSU Plan will harvest 17 million board feet a year. But for this to happen, the forest will need to avoid the sort of catastrophic fires that happened repeatedly during the 1800s on the Elliott and happened elsewhere in Oregon during the 2020 Labor Day fires.
2050 with fire: If the Elliott State Forest has a catastrophic fire, then the timber volume will likely fall back to 1930 volumes. This sort of firebomb would rapidly release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
Conclusion: Oregon's coastal forests are not a good long-term place to store huge quantities of flammable carbon; eventually the trees will burn, and they burn hotter and faster when they get older and larger.
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